new users are essentially soft locked from posting. what can we do about it?

[Yanderemenhera]

now, I am not a new user on post queue, however i've gotten DMs from people who are new. basically, new users can't post at all right now because nobody is there to approve posts. I know that approving posts usually takes a bit, but it's seemingly taking eons for anything to be approved, i've had to recommend just using a different forum to two different people in the same 24 hour period because they wanted to post and not have to wait an absurd amount of time to get a post approved. I would say that like, at night nothing being approved is reasonable or maybe it takes a bit during the day because nobody can be online at all times, but now there's only admin who can't be on much due to work and other adult responsibilities.

i'd also imagine that the queue is filled up quite a bit, so approving and filtering the posts might take a bit of time....

I know post queue is great at catching bots and things of that nature, but it's becoming an issue because it means that new people can't post at all and that fact makes them leave before they've even been able to interact with our community.

the obvious fix is getting more moderators, even if it's just one or two, (but that's another can of worms because this site is violently hemeraging them so when we do get a mod they get burnt out from being the only one to do anything about day to day operations or they have something come up in their personal life and they resign)

another obvious fix is to just automate it with AI, but bots aren't a good fix (look at discord) because they lack things like nuance and context. and they'd likely flag random people falsely because it doesn't understand that someone telling their friend that they are gonna evicerate them for making them lose a fortnight game is hyperbolic and not an actual threat to remove their internal organs.

what might we do to fix this issue? and if you're one of those people that'll just be like "but we need to keep bns nieche" or "if there's less people here, there will be less weirdos" genuinely think to yourself for one moment that you are not special and someone who's been here longer than you can say the exact same thing.

[xenthy]

the day bdns gets ai moderation is the day i leave i swear to god-

[JadeF1re]

as a still somewhat new person it only took me like 2-ish hours for my posts to get approved when I joined

it definitely took LONG, but not as LONG as of recent it seems

[Yanderemenhera]

@JadeF1re I do not know the exact amount of time, but posts just sit there for days now i'm pretty sure or just never get approved period

[Luana.vasper]

Mine got approved at least by the next day. God I wish I just had a laptop or smth so I could help out. I really don't want BDNS to crash and burn.